If asked
to condense to a single sound byte the most important lesson I’ve learned
about successful online interaction I’d have to say that it is all about
trust. One begins with a simple game of catch. I trust that if I send you a
message you’ll respond back and you trust I’ll do likewise. That if I support
you with fair and honest communications, you’ll return this same level of
support back to me.

With
this trust relationship as the foundational conduit for the transfer of
knowledge, the most scalable packaging of knowledge is the mastery learning
format of self-directed modules or lessons providing optimal convenience for
an unlimited number of learners. If properly structured, this leaves precious
interaction time reserved for general encouragement and specific questions to
sustain the essential motivation and self-confidence.

As
self-confidence with online learning builds, the door opens for more advanced
tools and pedagogies ultimately resulting in a motivated self-directed
Internet learner fully aware of one’s own potential as dramatically enhanced
by the historically unprecedented power of the Internet and related
technologies. Human potential has never had such powerful enablers as we find
at our fingertips today, but the art of developing social acceptance and best
practices for leveraging these tools is still in its infancy.

The
global impact one creative individual can make applying these new capabilities
is unlimited. The potential impact of empowering the majority of the world’s
population with such abilities is literally the task at hand.

In 1983,
as the visions for the Big Sky Telegraph project first began to form – from my
rural perspective, the challenge was to create opportunities for participatory
action research to learn how quickly rural citizens, and educators in
particular, could embrace the full dimension of the unlimited potential for
online learning, teaching, and purposeful collaboration to effect positive
community and global change.

20
Years and a Million Miles

During
the past 20 years since I first came online, I’ve traveled over a million
miles presenting on online learning and the potential for community
networking. This year I’ve presented keynotes for the Jamaican and Australian
Governments and visited remote Aboriginal communities slated to receive
broadband. Seven weeks were spent in Alaskan Native village schools who
received their first satellite Internet systems five years ago. Major
challenges still exist and it appears the devil is in the details and that
good intentions alone won’t deliver the hoped-for benefits. To my chagrin the
rural economic decline has accelerated despite local access to the Internet as
an educational and economic tool.

In
short, the vision I’d hoped the world would embrace two decades ago is still
largely missing; that by combining caring and connectivity with common sense
we’ll all have access to all our knowledge. Yet there are signs that awareness
is indeed growing that there is indeed something more to being online than
solo surfing and simple email.

The
Big Picture

In our
world today, half the population lives in dire poverty and has yet to make
their first phone call. In the next few decades, over 15,000 cultures and most
of the planet’s population will receive high speed Internet due to advances in
satellite and wireless technologies. For the first time in human history we
have the tools to literally change the world though low-cost ubiquitous online
education. But, before I attempt to detail the possibilities of the near
future, I’ve a story to tell about my quest to earn my own wings of freedom
and to learn how best to lend these wings to others. It bears reasons for the
telling.

A
Sense of Community

Born in
1952 in Cody, Wyoming,
the close knit community ties of the 50’s made a deep impression regarding my
sense of belonging. Suddenly having to move away at age seven, my growing up
was a long wait seeking to return to this lost sense of community. For the
decade of the sixties I lived in what was to become Silicon Valley, the bay area south of San Francisco, California.

Upon
graduating in 1974 from University of California, Davis, with a BA in
Psychology I had the choice of becoming a computer programmer or moving back
to Wyoming to work as a roughneck on oil rigs. The starting wages were the
same for both jobs. My perception of computers after learning about punch
cards and the Fortran programming language was that there is nothing more
lifeless than sitting at a computer all day long. My choice was easy, I headed
home to the Rocky Mountains, soon to be spending the nights working outdoors
at 40 below zero - and I was wildly happy to be there.

A
Vision for the Ultimate Freedom

When I
read Alvin Toffler’s book Future Shock it shared the vision that
someday, personal computers would be small enough and cheap enough we each
could afford one, and that someday, telecommunications would allow us to live
and work anywhere we pleased. I immediately made the decision to watch for the
emergence of these opportunities for extreme freedom! It could be a potential
solution for my long-term repatriation to Cody, Wyoming. All I had to do was
wait for these promises to become reality. Over much of the next decade
(1974-1982) I worked as an oilfield roughneck, carpenter/painter, and enjoyed
three years as a dude ranch manager - waiting.

Finally,
finally, in 1982, IBM announced their first personal computer and the Apple
IIe enhanced version had just come out. Modems had just been dramatically
upgraded from 300 to 1200 baud. Online communications using microcomputers was
opening doors to unknown possibilities. It was time to pursue Toffler’s
vision, urged on by the 1981 recession and being once again unemployed. In
1982, I enrolled at the University of Wyoming as one of the first four
students for a new masters program in Instructional Technology.

Two
years later, in 1984, with my new Master Degree in hand, I was caretaking a
ranch near Walden, Colorado, teaching “Microcomputers in Agriculture” for
Colorado Mountain College while looking for fulltime work to leverage my new
Degree. At that time microcomputers were still so new that most people were
frightened of them and there was little demand for expertise in instructional
technology.

I was
online via $18/hr toll lines at 2400 baud with a bulletin board system called
“The Little Red Electronic Schoolhouse” run by a retired army colonel, David
R. Hughes. Tentatively, I called Dave from my isolated ranch house hoping to
learn more. Two hours later, I pried the phone from my ear having received my
first passionate tutorial from the Cursor Cowboy. Here was a man with a
vision! This would become a weekly ritual for the next ten years.

The
Bull Colonel Online Mentoring Model

In
addition to providing my first online learning experience, Dave provided me
with an unfailing mentoring model. His bull colonel tenacity was not about to
let me fail and I learned to implicitly trust in his ongoing support. Today,
when I mentor educators in my online graduate courses my role is based on the
mastery learning guaranteed level of support I learned from Dave Hughes.
Failure is not an option!

One
Up Dialogs

In
person, we’d often both be talking at once, each interrupting the other
frequently without either of us taking offense and I imagined we looked like
two buffalos clawing the ground and huffing. Our ideas would build upon one
another in rapid-fire fashion, each idea suggesting the next logical
possibility. It was exciting to be inventing, discovering, and exploring all
at once – the potential future of the world.

We began
imagining what the high end educational applications of microcomputer
telecommunications might be. We’d each try to top the other’s imaginings by
going one better as an exercise to develop a vision for the best possible
working model to try out in an actual project. Eventually we evolved the idea
of creating the Big Sky Telegraph to connect the 100 one-room schools across
Montana. But it was to be four years before we’d finally win the funding.

Becoming an Assistant Professor

A
one-inch ad from WesternMontanaCollege,
a hundred-year-old teachers’ college in Dillon, Montana
was run once in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Frustrated from years of
underemployment, I bought a pinstripe suit, shaved my beard and drove 1000
miles to put in a face-to-face appearance and was soon hired as their first
Microcomputer Applications instructor. Upon arrival they ushered me down a
narrow stairway to an unfinished basement room with cement walls and ceiling.
Twenty-five boxed Apple IIes received through a grant sat unopened. The future
of the world was before me.

High
Tech- High Touch

Microcomputers were not considered important or even desirable by the
administration and faculty, but as we opened the doors to the public many
older returning students hoping to gain new employment skills signed up for my
microcomputer applications classes. White footprints were common in the
computer lab as workers from the nearby talc plant became regular students.

It was
not uncommon for some female students to be near tears in apprehension before
we’d even turned the computers on. Fearing their inadequacy to learn
computers, many students soon taught me that emotional encouragement was
essential to being an effective microcomputer applications instructor. John
Naisbett’s book Megatrends stated that high touch is needed to balance
high tech if people are to accept the technologies. This has since proved to
be all too true, amplified by the foreign nature of the online medium.

Big
Sky Telegraph (BST)

This
name was intended in invoke an image of an expansive imagination, unlimited
possibilities, and of an old-timey non-threatening communications technology
metaphor.

In 1987,
I won a small grant for $37,000 from the M.J. Murdoch Foundation, to engage
Dave Hughes’ expertise in creating one of the first Internet hosts running on
a microcomputer to offer online courses. The new 386 computer was just fast
enough to run SCO Unix and the Big Sky Telegraph went online, January 1st,
1988. Without compensation for my time, throughout the next year
the BST offered free 2400 baud modems to a pilot group of two dozen one-room
school teachers along with an online course with ten one-hour mastery learning
lessons titled “Microcomputer Telecommunications Basics.” As most educators
and rural citizens had no idea of the “online” possibilities, our challenge
was to bring to them their first experiences of online learning, one at a
time.

Social Engineering to Create the Greatest Potential Impacts for Online
Learning

Given
the unique ubiquitous nature of online learning and teaching, the challenge of
how to motivate engagement with the best and broadest educational applications
the medium allows suggested that designing a scalable train-the-trainers model
with social recognition incentives might be profoundly powerful.

With
this goal specifically in mind, the social role of Big Sky Telegrapher
was created and those completing the online course “Microcomputer
Telecommunications Basics” would be authorized to teach the lessons to others,
ideally for a fee. Though many teachers were quite proud of having completed
the online course very few took advantage of their potential to train others,
online. Perhaps the transition from mentee to mentor was too big a conceptual
leap. Still, the potential was there for scalable use of high quality online
lessons mentored by an unlimited number of people encouraging and supporting
the online learning of anyone, anywhere, anytime. It was the right idea, but
not the right time for the idea to catch fire in the popular imagination. In
contrast, our peer circuit riders providing face-to-face training proved to be
appropriate for the time.

As
educators completed the online course they received an embroidered patch (see
Figure 1) and diploma signifying that they were among “the first educational
pioneers to blaze the trail on the electronic frontier that others might
follow.” As the years went by we trained over 900 educators in 19 states, and
Finland. Our 700 collected lesson plans eventually (in 1995) became one of the
very first educational resources to be posted by the U.S. Department of
Education on their new website.

In 1989,
US West granted $280,000 for an expansion of Big Sky Telegraph to 100 one-room
schools. With the additional technical expertise of David Hughes JR, (Dave’s
son), we began creating the first of 29 local dial-up community bulletin
boards using an elegant cost-effective Fidonet system which collected emails
bound for distant systems and the Internet for automated exchange during the
low-cost nightly phone rates. As a representative application Junior High
School students in Montana
and Wyoming rural schools used these systems to learn Chaos Theory Mathematics
online - direct from Dr. George Johnston of the MIT Plasma Fusion Lab.

We’d
created affordable local community networks (bulletin board systems) with an
economical option for global email allowing rural educators, students, and
citizens opportunities for their first global collaborations. Our greatest
challenge was sharing the vision for how these tools could be used to generate
collaborative capacity. But the technologies changed faster than we could
thoroughly demonstrate their capabilities and engage citizens in understanding
their full potential.

Several
BBSCON conferences were held during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s bringing
together hundreds of electronic bulletin board systems (BBS) operators from
all over the country. After the World Wide Web hit, these became ISPCON
conferences (for Internet Service Providers) and somehow the emphasis for
building collaborative capacity disappeared and was replaced by the goals of
profit from selling Internet access.

Native American Share-art

In 1989,
Dave and I held a workshop on the Crow Reservation for Native American artists
from five Montana
reservations. They learned to use computers to create original artwork in the
NAPLPS format for sale online using the shareware model – thus creating
share-art that while shareable online, was intended to be paid for if anyone
were to keep or use the artwork. A photograph of the artists appeared in a
congressional report on the future potential of the online world. The NAPLPS
format turned out to soon be preempted by other formats, but the idea of
digital art as a culturally reinforcing economic activity would survive.

The
Telecom Trappers Rendezvous

The era
of the first white trappers lasted only twenty years before the settlers
followed them and ended their era. Dave and I decided to hold a special
conference in Cody, Wyoming to recognize the passing nature of the era of the
early online pioneers. Our goal for the rendezvous was to acknowledge and
celebrate our awareness of the brief nature of the era of the first
explorations on this new frontier, knowing that the pristine online landscapes
would soon change forever as the dust clouds of the advancing settlers were
already on the horizon.

Twenty-five persons attended coming from both coasts and we sat in a Rocky
Mountain meadow of wildflowers on a spring day with a microcomputer at the end
of a couple hundred feet of extension cords to view some of the first Native
American digital Share-art in history and to talk about themes such as “with
power comes responsibility” and how online communication was unlocking
profound potential for global education, community empowerment, cultural
sovereignty, and more, much more.

It was
this visioning that was special to our group and we intuitively knew the
future would be limited only by our imaginations. This was to prove all too
true in the coming years. Our key concern and topic for discussion was the
question of whether our vision would become widespread or somehow be lost. As
we spoke of the potential for a true electronic democracy, there was another
online project gearing up in California,
called America Online.

The
Reach for the Sky Project

In 1993,
a grant was written and promptly won $880,000 for the Reach for the Sky
project. The Annenberg Science and Math Initiative and U.S. West co-funded a
three-year project to create three online classes for 20 master science and
math teachers to receive online via their new laptops with the intent they
would use these classes to mentor science and math educators across a
five-state region. My chosen role was creating and teaching the online
courses. The Reach for the Sky Lessons are still quite viable and are
available online at
http://www.learner.org/courses/rfts/.

Within
the first few weeks of the first online course it became clear that despite
each of the teachers being a master teacher, their readiness to embrace the
online learning mode differed wildly. We quickly adjusted to an individualized
learning format as a few were already way out ahead, and a few just couldn’t
seem to get their minds around the simplest concepts of online interaction.
Concrete linear “left brain” thinkers seemed to have a much harder time than
spatial “right brain” thinkers particularly with global concepts.

National and Global Impacts of Big Sky Telegraph (BST)

Over
time it became clearer that the biggest impacts of the BST project were not on
those who participated directly, but were on those in other states and
countries who read the colorful stories written by Dave Hughes on the
pioneering teachers in remote one-room schools sharing curriculum online and
beginning to communicate with educators globally. Many people became inspired
that “if they can do it in rural Montana, why can’t we do this in our state?” Larger than life
stories created major motivation for grassroots champions in other states to
imagine what’s possible and to generate dozens of projects that ultimately
went beyond the scope and scale of the Big Sky Telegraph.

As there
were few rural online learning projects during the late 1980s and early
1990’s, I enjoyed being a frequent presenter at national educational
technology and community networking conferences. Online learning and
collaboration naturally supported building both virtual and geographical
communities. Some weeks I’d fly coast to coast twice. From 1988 to 1998 I
averaged roughly 50,000 miles a year.[1]

The
Community Networking Movement

Participating in online discussions on electronic democracy in 1987 was very
exciting as national experts articulately built upon each others’ ideas to
create exciting new possibilities which evolved daily. In 1994, I was asked to
serve as Senior Advisor for Community Networking for the newly formed Morino
Institute (http://www.morino.org)
lead by Mario Morino. Partnering with Apple computer, the Morino Institute
co-hosted two national community networking conferences titled “The Ties That
Bind.” One was held in Cupertino in 1994. The following year another as held
in Taos, New Mexico,
home of the La Plaza Telecommunity.

National Public Telecomputing Network

In 1986,
I met Tom Grundner, who created an online community network called the St.
Joe’s Silicon Hospital, which evolved into the Cleveland Freenet. Eventually
over 120 Freenets were created in the U.S. and Canada and the National Public
Telecomputing Network (NPTN) was formed. These text-only bulletin boards were
the first to offer free Internet access with intuitive recognition of the
importance of ubiquitous Internet access.

In
retrospect there really wasn’t much you could do with the Internet at that
time other than email. However, information retrieval systems were rapidly
evolving with systems like gopher, veronica, and others. To the best of my
knowledge, the Big Sky Telegraph was the only educational community network/freenet
offering online instruction and as such was something of an anomaly. We were
grateful to be generously included despite our educational emphasis. At that
time the two worlds of online learning and community networking were quite
separate.

It was
becoming clear that indeed the potential for community benefits from online
knowledge sharing was also limited only by our imaginations and surely
everyone would soon see the wonderful possibilities. It seemed obvious that a
community networking movement had begun and that the ascent would be rapid.
But, what happened next was unexpected. The web happened.

The
Graphical WWW Preempts the Community Networking Movement

In 1994,
the world wide web appeared and suddenly the power and purity of text-only
communications was viewed by most as inadequate and suddenly obsolete. The
reading and writing medium emphasis was displaced with a point-and-click
graphical emphasis and entertainment displaced purposeful collaboration much
to the chagrin of the early pioneers who understood the power of online
written interaction.

Originally, the Big Sky Telegraph offered dial-up Internet access for only
$10/month, but now local Internet services were becoming available. They were
certainly more affordable than long distance calls to BST, offering unlimited
local access for a flat fee. This new option caused people to leave the
collaborative Big Sky Telegraph to become solo-basement browsers. When the IRS
announced that institutions of higher education could no longer charge for
providing dial-up Internet access the economic sustainability of the Big Sky
Telegraph disappeared and US West ended their funding support.

The NPTN
Freenets rapidly lost their paid clients and their sustainability eventually
disappeared along with the visions for online community-building and the power
of collaboration for building collaborative capacity. It would be another
decade before the vision for purposeful collaboration would again begin to
regain prominence.

Instead
of the community networking movement growing to match the potential the new
technologies, the passionate vision almost flickered out. The Association for
Community Networking (http://www.afcn.org)
was formed in 1995 by a small cadre of dedicated community-builders, destined
to be keepers of the flame for the next eight years without significant
support or funding.

Up to
the current day, hundreds of community networking projects were created by
grassroots champions with a vision for what could be, and all but a precious
few failed to find sustained funding support. A vast boneyard of failed
projects marks the brief history of the community networking movement. Yet
these were not failures as much as they were the evolutionary first steps
forward demonstrating to the world fundamentally powerful new ways of building
local and global collaborative capacity.

After
1994, as the bell curve of the community networking movement took a nosedive,
the community technology center movement was on the upswing. While
non-technology oriented foundations found the concepts of online interaction
and community networking daunting, the tangibility of a community technology
center won approval and computer labs sprung up in housing projects and
communities nationally. A national Community Technology Center (CTC)
organization was formed (http://www.ctcnet.org)
and after ten years of operation has over 1200 CTC’s as members and holds an
annual conference.

But,
most CTC’s do not emphasize teaching online collaboration and online learning
skills or prepare citizens for online participation in community networks to
build collaborative capacity. Most centers have only a vague idea of what
curriculum will be most empowering. As an initial practical strategy they tend
to focus on teaching employability skills often limited to word processing and
computer basics.

My own
experience suggests that community technology centers need to prioritize
teaching self-directed Internet learning skills and online collaboration
skills, ideally generating local community networks as the hub for local
online capacity building focusing on collaborative local problem-solving.
Short learning modules should be sequenced in a progression of empowering
capabilities with certification for specific skills achieved. Civic
participation and mentoring others would be inherent as part of the essential
skill-building activities. My challenge was emerging as to how best to
articulate the full vision for an ideal empowerment curriculum.

Lone
Eagle Consulting: Attaining the Ultimate Freedom

After a
full ten years of teaching rural teachers online through the Big Sky
Telegraph, WesternMontanaCollege
told me if I didn’t win another grant soon, they’d discontinue my position. My
last grant didn’t come through so after 1.4 million dollars of funding and ten
years of championing the cause of online learning and community networking,
they showed me the door and pulled the plug on the Big Sky Telegraph (January
1, 1988 to January, 1, 1998.) The only tenure I was awarded was a ten-year
certificate as I held only a Masters Degree. I left to seek a higher
education.

It was
actually something of a mutual decision. If they didn’t wish to back my online
support of rural educators, the college was no longer where I needed to be.
I’d become weary of the grant-writing carousel, the passive institutional
resistance to innovation, and believed it would be more important to model how
one can become independent of grant-writing and institutions.

Fifteen
years after I’d returned to earn my Masters Degree to fulfill Alvin Toffler’s
promise of independence, I left Western to found Lone Eagle Consulting. A $500
office visit to a lawyer secured the creation of an S-corporation. A visit to
an accountant secured the payroll and financial expertise for payroll
deductions for the corporation’s president and sole employee. As a fledgling
Lone Eagle about to spread my wings for the first time, my opportunity was now
to demonstrate how to win and sustain the ultimate freedom as online learner,
teacher, and instructional entrepreneur. I’ve never looked back.

Lone
Eagle Consulting’s mission is to provide the very best fast track online
Internet training possible for rural, remote, and indigenous learners (http://lone-eagles.com):

"The greatest freedom one can give to another is how to become a
self-sufficient learner and earner, via the Internet. This site is dedicated
to those who lend their wings to others."

My first
contract was with the Agency for International Development to create a
cross-cultural self-directed online learning Internet guide intended for use
in Jamaica. I’d also received an invitation to provide the first
Internet workshops for 11 Alaskan Native villages that were soon to receive
satellite Internet systems. I began adapting this resource guide for use by
Alaskan Natives and Native Americans. Materials created for these projects
include:

Common Ground: A
Cross-Cultural Self-Directed Learner's Internet Guide
http://lone-eagles.com/guide.htm Created for USAID, AT&T, and the ERIC
clearinghouse.
An instructional brokerage resource with emphasis on pointing to the best
online tutorials,
and educational resources on the Internet for self-directed learning. This is
the text for the
online course "Making
the Best Use of Internet for K-12 Instruction"
http://lone-eagles.com/asdn1.htm

Echoes in the Electronic
Wind - A Native American Cross-cultural Internet Guide
http://lone-eagles.com/nativeguide.htm
A hands-on self-directed learner's Internet skills training guide with over 20
pages of
Native American and Alaskan Native web sites. Available in printed form; 177
pages.

Realizing Cultural and
Community Sustainability Through Internet Innovations in Alaskan Native
Villages

During 1998-2000, the first Internet satellite systems were installed in the
11 bush villages of the Yukon-Koyukuk School District (YKSD). Three one-day
Internet workshops were held in these 11 bush villages over a two-year period
(see Figure 2).

My first
workshop was in Nulato, 250 miles west of Fairbanks on the Yukon River. The
small eight-seat Cessna plane had duct tape holding the windows and seats
together. I’d been advised to dress for subzero temperatures in order to
survive any unscheduled landings. I was led to the school library and shown
where I could roll out my sleeping bag between the bookcases. Looking out the
window, the snow was blowing sideways and I could see the wide white expanse
of the frozen Yukon river. Just outside the window was an iron post where the
Internet satellite dish was supposed to have been installed prior to my
arrival. I had just begun to learn about organizational capacity issues in
bush villages. I was keenly aware I was experiencing one of the last
days ever that this village would be as it always had been – without Internet
– without a direct conduit to the world’s knowledge base.

That
night I thought hard about my past ten years of teaching rural teachers online
and was full of eager anticipation for the wonderful empowering capabilities I
had the opportunity to impart to the bush teachers the next day. I was fully
prepared to lend my wings to the village teachers and was eager to do so. I’d
come prepared with Internet sites on CD-ROMs, and with dozens of web sites
captured on my laptop using an offline browser. I had a digital camera, a
digital art tablet, a MIDI musical keyboard. The next day I taught both
teachers and students how to create web pages, to browse and search, to create
digital art, and to manipulate digital photos. My first challenge was to
create motivation for future learning and to begin to help overcome their
adversity to technology.

After
leaving, and once the Internet satellite dish had finally been installed, the
teachers were invited to join my online class to continue their learning and
in particular to become comfortable with learning and communicating online.
The results were significant but not nearly as exciting as I’d hoped for.

Inconsistent local technical support, weak district support for learning
technologies, and other factors combined to create few incentives for ongoing
learning and most of the busy teachers exercised their option to maintain
their status quo by doing as little as possible. There were cultural tensions
resisting the continual pressure of the dominant white culture, of which
technology was initially perceived to represent. Over time, the technology
would take on a Native voice as the benefits of family communications between
villages was embraced using Hotmail. I returned for one-day workshops twice
more over the next two years and found that due to a 49% annual turnover in
teachers and administrators, I had to begin anew each time.

There
were of course many significant successes, such as the innovative principal in
Koyukuk who helped his students post community web pages and Athabascan
language web pages on the school web site (http://kyu.yksd.com).
And the teacher in Allakaket who modified my Rural Ecommerce lessons to help
her sixteen teenage students in becoming the first Athabascan youth to ever
complete online Ecommerce lessons. But, she’s gone now. Cultural shifts take
time and there were also political limitations which prohibited wireless home
access for Ecommerce using E-rate funded Internet dedicated for school use,
only.

Making the Best Use of Internet for K12 Instruction

In 1998,
Lone Eagle Consulting created two online courses for Alaska Pacific
University. The first course “Making the Best Use of Internet for K12
Instruction” proved to be very effective by providing immediate practical
benefits and motivation for bush educators. With effusive emotional support
teachers became self-directed learners able to find and utilize vast archives
of educational resources as well as creating their own web-based project-based
learning units. Seeing the explosive motivation of these teachers has clearly
and powerfully validated the value of online learning and friendly online
mentoring in my own experience. Expectations increase with experience.

This
course integrates standard K12 education with the development of self-directed
Internet learning as basic skills, project-based learning in a service
learning context to generate meaningful content for local community networks,
and relating ecommerce and entrepreneurship to youth retention and relevancy
to elementary education.

The
significance of the fact that rural citizens typically isolated from
information resources and learning opportunities could suddenly have unlimited
learning opportunities was unprecedented in its implications. What would it
take for rural citizens to see their dramatically enhanced potential? If “We
are what we know,” then the opportunities for human potential development in
rural areas has suddenly increased many orders of magnitude – IF people can
understand and embrace their new opportunities.

A fact
of rural reality is too often we don’t know what need to know unless someone
makes a point of telling us directly. For example, there is an invisible
relocation drama taking place in rural America where those who resist or are
denied learning how to use information technology to be able to live and work
in rural areas are being forced to relocate to the cities to find work.
Conversely, those in the cities who do learn these skills find themselves able
to relocate to sublime rural areas often buying the homes of displaced rural
workers. The Internet can be an ongoing solution to staying current on
knowing what we didn’t know we needed to know IF we are able to connect with
the right relationships and expertise.

Another
major invisible issue related to rural relocation is that generational
turnover requiring decades may prove necessary before a new generation of
rural leaders emerge who are willing to allow necessary change to occur. Rural
citizens may eventually understand and regret what they could have done today
UNLESS a dramatic surge in self-awareness and proactive leadership takes place
soon. The downside risk is displacement of a majority of rural citizens and
the pain that goes with losing one’s cherished rural lifestyle.

While
state governments talk about E-government and using Internet for Ecommerce to
adjust to a changing economy, the real innovation is taking place at the
citizen level in lieu of any real governmental leadership. The top-down
governments and telecommunications corporations need to learn from the
bottom-up innovators about the dynamics of adapting to a changing world.

As the
pace of technological advancement intensifies, there is a corresponding
increase in the rate of change in the global economy and societies. The
pressure is on to learn how E-governments can learn to adjust more quickly. At
the same time those creative individuals who have learned how to upgrade
themselves are quietly setting an example for the attitudes, skills, and
behaviors required for successful adaptation and harmonic survival.

While it
is becoming widely accepted that something has to change and that education;
learning something new, is necessary, no one has yet owned the responsibility,
not local or state government, or K12 schools, or higher education
institutions. This is ultimately everyone’s responsibility. New forms of
community learning are badly needed.

Synergies Between the Online Learning and Community Networking Movements

Language
has inherent limitations as words are but block sculptures of reality. Often
the terms we use can be unwittingly self-limiting. For example, the terms
“online learning” and “community networking.” In my mind the two mean the
same thing: “knowledge sharing to build individual and community capacity
using the best technology tools.” Over the last 20 years I’ve had a foot in
both camps and have seen a steady merging of both movements.

Simply
stated, this synergy is tantamount to defining e-life recognizing that there
are progressive stages based on the truism “expectations increase with
experience.” Inherent in this progression is the potential for an ideal
curriculum begging to be validated and widely taught.

As one
learns to use search engines well one develops self-directed learning skills
able to teach oneself on any topic as necessary. Collaborative problem-solving
taught through project-based learning activities builds knowledge worker
skills. As favorite sites on topics of interest are cut and pasted and posted
as community resources a civic contribution is realized. Such action reveals a
potential social role as mentor and local expert. In addition to creating free
community resources and peer mentoring, service learning activities lead
toward potentially offering knowledge-based services on a for-profit basis. In
a knowledge and service economy instructional entrepreneurship emerges as a
way to simultaneously create both social and economic value.

Ultimately, as both social and economic value are created there is a maturing
of self-esteem, self-confidence, self-worth, personal identity, and defining a
contributing role within the community. As such meaning and identity are
developed the awareness grows for potential impacts well beyond the community
– limited only by one’s imagination. The highest stages attainable through
e-learning are marked by taking action regarding e-democracy and transnational
activism - through leadership teaching others.

The past
history of rural life is marked by severely limited access to information and
learning – fundamentally “doing without.” But, the future of rural life has
more to do with managing and balancing information overload through mutual
collaboration to sustain communities while sculpting a lifestyle; literally
making a life while making a living.

The
Milkstool Theory and Implications

The milk
stool theory says that communities stand on the four legs of government,
business, education, and health care. Each of these now begins with an “E” –
representing the best uses of information technology. If we add to this the
inevitable emergence of best practices for e-citizenship and e-community, the
issue become defining the best replicable process and exactly what this all
means. Does this mean simply we all learn how to browse the web and use email,
or is there more?

We dream
that information and communications technologies (ICT’s) will be well used,
but the devil is in the details. How well we use ICT’s depends on the quality
of the education we each receive.

E-government, e-business, e-education, and e-health all require citizens to be
able to access essential information and to become self-directed Internet
learners able to collaborate effectively both online and offline.
E-citizenship, e-communities, and e-democracy require an informed and
participatory populace. Our shared challenge is to harness the inherent human
potential of each of us. What’s the best a rural community can do for itself
morphing into a vital learning community? This has become the big question.
The future of America’s rural communities hangs in the balance.

Creating Smarter Rural Communities

This
process begins with imparting a realistic vision for collaborative
participation to citizens and organizations regarding their specific roles,
ongoing activities, and highest value applications. Specific short-term action
agendas are required to validate the potential of Internet infrastructure for
building collaborative capacity in support of the social and economic
sustainability of the community.

Within
the greater community, the need exists to bring together the specific
sub-communities around a common culturally-oriented purpose: the educational
community, the economic development community, the healthcare community, the
faith-based and community-based organizations - as examples. As the community
vision becomes initially tangible and the first measurable outcomes win
positive approval, the process of growing a more and more robust community
vision accelerates.

This
process requires social mechanisms for encouraging and sustaining citizen
participation. Social recognition is important and justified for those who
contribute their time and content. Strategies such as friendly competitions
can focus the community on identifying the highest quality resources and
Internet applications that produce local benefit. Ongoing community
goal-setting and self-assessment are fundamentally necessary if forward
progress is to be achieved.

In
addition, strategies will be proven which provide the highest citizen
motivation to generate the highest levels of community benefit, requiring the
least investment of time, money, and prerequisite literacy. Public metrics of
success can be identified as competitive measures validating those communities
that most effectively combine caring and connectivity with common sense.

The Clarity of Common
Sense

The common view of rural
communities is: “We’ve yet to see a rural community benefit significantly from
use of the Internet.” There’s an important missing link here between the
glowing promises of the telecommunications companies and the government that
broadband is essential and indisputably beneficial, and the opposite
perception of rural citizens based on their very practical experience that
there are no proven benefits.

An Inevitable Reality for Communities Hoping to be CompetitiveAs broadband becomes
increasingly commonplace, communities are beginning to understand that they
will compete on the demonstrated talents of an inspired and motivated
citizenry. Visible demonstrations of advanced telecommunications and
technology applications are a selling point for communities seeking to
showcase their ability to learn, innovate, and grow.

An Issue of National CompetitivenessThe vigor of our communities, our nation, and all other nations, will
depend on creating motivated lifelong learners, proactive citizens who are
value-driven, innovative entrepreneurs, skilled collaborators, and citizens
who are both consumers and producers - both learners and teachers, all the
time.

Those communities first
to show true widespread participation in realizing tangible benefits may well
enjoy a cottage industry for decades to come teaching other communities how to
replicate their success, online. It is just a matter of who and when.

Struggling to Share the Vision

If you
were to ask Montanans the definitions of ignorance and apathy? You might well
hear: “I don’t know and I don’t care.” While they’d be correct in this
instance, you might get the same answer if you asked about the Internet,
ecommerce or online collaborative capacity-building. Can the significant
cultural shift take place while there’s still time?

Lending
one’s wings to others requires the right approach and the right timing. One
can only give to people that which they’re ready to receive.

Citizenship, Community-building, and Entrepreneurship in the Knowledge Age

Needed is a specific curriculum for educators and those who work with youth
which presents a hands-on review of Internet resources and curriculum
templates integrating K12 curriculum with online collaboration and the
essential skills related to growing successful citizens in the "knowledge
age." Emphasis is needed on developing both local, and global, citizenship
concepts, skills, and practices.

Success creating knowledge workers prepared for work in a global knowledge
economy requires a K12 emphasis on developing the social value and self-worth
of students and requires they become skilled at creating and maintaining
meaningful relationships both offline and online.

There
is an immediate need to bridge the gap between K12 education and the ability
to use the Internet for economic development. The accelerating pace of change
requires that students learn how to think innovatively and to maintain
awareness of successful innovations related to emerging vocational and
entrepreneurial opportunities in their communities. A service learning project
creating local web-based content for their communities showcasing local and
regional Ecommerce and entrepreneurial Internet innovations would be an
example of the trend necessary for students to become involved with their
communities' economic development and sustainability issues.

Teaching Students Global Citizenship in the Knowledge Age – Hands-on

Many
realistic student-driven community activities can be presented for students to
initiate community interaction. Examples include gathering content for local
web display to raise community awareness about the genuine opportunities the
Internet represents, as detailed in the Bootstrap Academy (http://lone-eagles.com/academy.htm).

Citizenship education needs to include values development in the form of
character education and service learning. A knowledge society and an
electronic democracy require educated citizens with skills in both offline,
and online, articulation, and collaboration. Internet skills for self-directed
learning and web self-publishing are required for competent citizens in a
knowledge society. Character Education Web Tour (http://lone-eagles.com/chared.htm).

There
are many models for using project-based learning methodologies to stimulate
student creation of web-based content to benefit the local community which
could be consolidated into a course for educators. As awareness grows through
the use of existing curricular models, educators will learn to use existing
templates to begin to create their own innovative curriculum. Students will
also learn to use templates to create instructional experiences for both other
students and adults in the local community.

Here
are a few project examples related to community content created by students:

At
the Global Schoolhouse,
http://www.gsh.org , is a projects directory where teachers can post
multi-classroom collaborative projects to find international partners.
Collaborative tools and pedagogies are listed as well.

The International Cyberfair competition,
http://www.gsh.org , has elementary students create web pages
celebrating eight categories of local achievement.

Entrepreneurship sites and cooperatives for youth and women are listed along
with Ecommerce Start-up training resources and sites offering free Ecommerce
web sites at
http://lone-eagles.com/entrelinks.htm.

Changing Perceptions for Online Learning
After 20 years and a million miles: What’s the same and what’s different

The
original essays and vision of the Big Sky Telegraph are as relevant to the
modern day as they were in the late 1980’s. The technologies are a thousand
times more powerful, but somehow the ability to imagine what’s possible has
stalled. Tired of corporate hype and overwhelmed with too much useless
information, many have turned away from believing in the power of thoughtful
online learning and interaction.

In 1988,
my license plate read “Online” and at that time “online” meant bibliographic
searches by a university librarian. Over the years the popular perception of
the word “online” kept changing, soon it suggested use of electronic bulletin
board systems, then it was the world wide web as an esoteric activity and the
arena of billionaire geniuses from Silicon Valley, then it was mainstream AOL
chat and shopping, and after the stock bust it was the tired activity of the
failed dreams of dot.com businesses. Today “Online” represents a rather
confused mix of spam, scams, hoaxes, pornography, lurking pedophiles,
malicious viruses, pop-up ads, and hyped promises of valueless corporations
vying for control over the world view of hapless consumers.

Bringing back the Vision

Many
teachers still view online learning as direct competition with traditional
classroom learning, and as a potential threat to their jobs. On the brighter
side, as more teachers get hands-on experience with online learning they
realize their challenge is really how to bring the best of both mediums to
their students such that they can use the Internet for self-directed Internet
learning as well as purposeful collaboration and self-expression.

Traditionally, online degrees were considered inferior, but this attitude is
also changing. The validity of quality online learning and the integrity of
using the Internet wisely are growing. Today one U.S. worker out of ten
engages in telework, able to live and work anywhere, anytime. Companies are
beginning to recognize their most talented workers are increasingly demanding
the flexibility that comes with telework. Truly skilled knowledge workers have
no limits on the specific information and assistance of peers worldwide they
can call to their fingertips at a moment’s notice.

We’re
Limited Only by Our Imaginations

Recently, I received an online tutorial, “live” using voice over the Internet,
remote application-sharing, co-browsing, and two-way PC-based video
conferencing in preparation for a project training disabled workers in rural
ecommerce and telework skills over the next five years. I’ve developed a rural
ecommerce non-credit online class offered for rural citizens to learn
what’s working online for others like them, as their first online learning
experience.

I’m in
touch with helping planners regarding Jamaican and Australian indigenous
training projects by articulating the new role of education and Internet as
related to rural workforce development, and all the while mentoring teachers
and citizens in online classes taught through three universities; Alaska
Pacific University, Seattle Pacific University, and Idaho State University.
I’m also advising government leaders for the States of Idaho and Montana on
e-learning and community networking while continuing model work with
Montpelier, Idaho aimed at producing the first rural community success story
in Idaho.
(Ecommerce curriculum and success stories:
http://lone-eagles.com/connect-idaho.htm).

Once an
isolated rural citizen struggling for manual labor employment, I’ve expanded
my creative capacity a hundred fold by learning to develop my own
self-directed Internet learning and teaching skills. And my impact on others
to date can be counted in the thousands, and will soon grow exponentially once
again.

Constructivism Yagga Yagga –Style

The
essence of constructivism to build one’s own knowledge is “learning by doing.”
The literacy levels worldwide are an issue. Recently I was in the Aboriginal
community of Yagga Yagga in Western Australia showing an Aboriginal woman how
to use a digital camera to become instantly a digital author and storyteller.
The Sony CD-550 camera records audio with photographs and can save video on
the 3-inch CD, ready to pop into a computer and play. Then she learned to use
a digital art tablet and within minutes was smiling broadly as she swirled
together one of the first examples of digital Aboriginal artwork.

With the
obvious motivation from these first experiences comes the question of what the
best ongoing training program might look like. While reading and writing might
be an initial barrier, email using voice files and digital storytelling and
art could allow language-based Internet interaction at many levels, seeding
the confidence and motivation for further learning as a fun social
culturally-relevant activity rather than a Victorian colonializing regime;
empowering rather than dominating.

Recommended reading is “Authenticating Rural Broadband Benefits – A Reality
Check” (http://lone-eagles.com/wings.htm)
written for the Australian government regarding their national plan to deploy
broadband to rural and remote areas. The Lone Eagle keynote for a national
broadband conference, Oct. 6th, 2003, focused on the advice to
avoid the U.S. dilemma of a “lose-lose” situation where government and
telecommunications corporations have failed to communicate to citizens the
benefits of broadband and as a result have a severely weakened business case.
And on the other hand citizens are not benefiting from existing broadband as
intended and are not creating a vibrant market for additional broadband
deployment. This situation can and must be reversed!

As I
finish this writing I’m bringing online an open source content management
system with the technical assistance of David Hughes JR at
http://lone-eagles.oldcolo.com which will integrate online learning and
community networking with advanced broadband distance learning technologies
and unique social engineering methodologies. In conclusion; this is where the
real story will begin.

From
the time I started using the earliest personal computers - Radio Shack Model I
- with the first text processor for such a computer, Electric Pencil, in
1977, and then with a 300 Baud Acoustic Cat Novation Modem in 1979, running
the simplest terminal programs and Xmodem invented to support a new medium
called a 'Bulletin Board' by Ward Christiansen about the time when the
earliest commercial, online dialup Service emerged - The Source, which
predated Compuserve, America Online, much less the Internet - it was clear to
me that this medium could and should be used for Education. K-99.

Having, as a West Point graduate (1950) taught English at the Military Academy
in the late 50s. And then, as a senior advisor to the then Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara in 1966, I saw the 'miniaturization' of technology
and global, affordable telecommunications coming. So I was fully ready in
1977, after having retired in 1973 from 27 years active military service, for
the first microcomputers which emerged from Apple and Radio Shack. They were
tools for general and universal 'communications.'

I
have been working in advanced Telecommunications the 30 years since then. And
implicit in all that work, is teaching and learning, online. Above all, I
understood by 1979 that the two basic subjects which were declining in mastery
by American school children – written English and Math - could be taught via
such instruments. And I saw by closely observing one of my own children who
had mild dyslexia, that English could not only be taught, but in my opinion
better, more comprehensively and faster via personal computers and modem
communications. And as a lifelong writer and poet, I saw that 'back space and
blot out' would be a revolution in the reading and writing of text.

I
also was aware that it would be rural schools which would be left behind, not
because personal - classroom - computers would be unaffordable - but that the
government regulated costs of rural voice telephone communications used for
modem connection could make 'online' instruction prohibitively expensive.

So I
set about exploring this medium, connecting with every public-access online
service in the US, and
several in foreign countries (Japan and England especially) spending freely
for the connectivity until I understood just how revolutionary it was, and why
and how, students from a young age should be exposed and tutored in its. As a
quite successful writer, I was paid liberally for my short pieces I wrote from
the Korean War battlefield. My literary genes descended from 13 generations
of Welsh preachers from that land that so celebrates language, story telling,
the bardic tradition and the mysteries of poetry. I even began to see - feel -
subtle characteristics in both online, and onscreen text that went beyond
Gutenberg and the printed page.

In
fact, while still on the Source, and later on Compuserve I began to experiment
with modes of written expression that took account of the number of characters
across the computer screen -80- and the number of lines per screen -25- and
the phenomenon of 'scrolling' text, and the effect on 'meaning' of the motion
of letters or punctuation on the screen, as they moved. Today I write almost
entirely for screens. Rarely for paper.

Over
time I developed a wholly new literary form which I called 'Word Dance' that
recognized that words in the form of light, on a computer screen had the added
- to words on fixed surfaces, property of Time. I - and anyone else could -
using the computer processor with appropriate software, present text anywhere
on the screen - not, ala traditional upper left to lower right while the eyes
moved over the text - cause it to move, blink, change slowly - giving it
'meaning' more akin to variations in voice - a kind of visual speech, even to
the point of holding the eye fixed on the center of the screen while the text
came at one in a digital stream. Only text.

And I
concluded the most 'natural' and effective form of writing in the constrained,
but dynamic space online was poetry - not prose. And began to write pieces,
such as 'The Dance of the Red Leds' which could not be reduced to paper, or
read aloud, but could only exist on dynamic computer screens. I observed that
the only place this was done in our culture was in Television advertising -
dynamic words. Visual speech. But very costly to produce on specialized
machines. Not for Everybody - yet.

Now
all of this would have just been academic and arcane research, and the
experiments of an artist, except I was aware that youngsters growing up
looking at text and blinking numbers on LCDs on their watches, their school
and home computer screen, ATM machines - dynamic digital displays. That they
were going to use 'language' differently from their parents who grew up
watching television, or their grandparents who grew up reading text on paper..
That if children were to be taught properly in school how to deal with
language in the future via computer networks - which everyone would eventually
have - they needed to be taught differently from the emerging trend in some
colleges and even schools in just putting Lessons on computer screens which
were indistinguishable from the same text in a book or on paper.

So,
by 1980 I had developed formal courses which could only be delivered online,
and interactively with the students. I called the form 'Electronic English.'
And it was aimed far more at the Teachers, than the K-12 students, for I saw
that they, even when they were quite computer literate, and getting used to
online forms, knew little of how different this form really was. Which
courses not only delved into the subtleties some of the subjects above raise
but also how the style of email, mail lists, interactive group real-time or
computer conferencing 'chats' differed as much from text papers, as delivered
speech differed from paper. It would be a major third form of human discourse.

In
the fall of 1981 I was asked by local Colorado Technical College - if I would
teach for them. I agreed. Using the Source as the link between remote and
local classroom students, most but not all adult, I taught the first formal
credit college course of Electronic English in July, 1981. Two 'students' were
as far away as Australia and Alaska (the past Lt Governor Red Boucher, who
paid by credit card from Anchorage).
One of them who took the course was Frank Odasz, from WesternMontanaCollege. He
had found me via my own Old Colorado City Electronic Cottage Bulletin-Board,
and its 'Lil Red Electronic Schoolhouse' section. I had said to him, he should
not attempt to teach online courses until he at least had taken my course
himself, and knew what it means to be an online student. He did well, and
went onto create Big Sky Telegraph.

These
efforts were covered widely by the print press and media, starting with
technical magazines, then newspapers, and finally by educational journals. I
was asked to speak in many venues throughout the 80s. This evolved to courses
I then fashioned and taught for Pikes Peak Community College specifically for
teachers. I used my own servers by this time, and more advanced software
optimized for the purpose.

I was
approached by Physicist Dr. George Johnston, MIT in 1990 who stated that MIT
was concerned about the state of math and science education in the nations
schools. That MIT professors had been visiting Boston Schools to help
teachers, but that was very local, and costly in time. Could I help using
distance learning techniques? (The Internet had not arrived yet nationally). I
said yes, and very quickly, with my setting up the networks, which included
Fidonet links in Montana and Wyoming, UUCP between Unix systems in larger
cities, Dr. Johnston taught the first credit high school courses in the Math
and Physics of Chaos to a virtual classroom of 40 students, who were in one
small school in northern Montana, the High School in Cody, Wyoming, Air
Academy High School in Colorado Springs, as well as two Junior High schools
whose students were in AP classes. That was September 1990. In several cases
the math teachers who did not know the subject of Chaos (which did not exist
when they got their degree, or in their refresher training) took the course
alongside, collaboratively, with their own students. It worked. And one young
woman in Cody, Wyoming whose high school could not even offer her AP Calculus,
took the course, and with Dr. Johnston's help matriculated at MIT.

In
1991 I was asked to submit papers for a study about 'NREN' - National Research
and Educational Network - for Senator Al Gore's Staff by the Congressional
Office of Technology Assessment on K-12 online education. I did that and was
told later that it was the first appearance in Washington of a case for
extending the emerging 'Internet' to K-12 distance learning. A paper from
that, called "Appropriate and Distributed Networks: A Model for K-12
Educational Telecommunications" was circulated widely in Washington, include
being requested by the staff of Congressman Edwin Markey of Massachusetts,
who was increasingly interest in the use of networks for education.

About
this time also, 1992, I retained the programming expertise of Russians in
Moscow, to create a program called 'Troika' which carried out my Word Dance
ideas in an OSI protocol called NAPLPS, which, not so incidentally could
permit the easy composition on any personal computer, without broadband, in
all foreign language fonts, from Cyrillic and Arabic, to Chinese and
Norweigan. It was no longer needed after the World Wide Web came on the scene.
But it incorporated many language-teaching techniques.

By
this time, in 1994, while 'online learning' was beginning to appear more
generally, I was researching alternative ways to get broadband to rural
communities and schools - which were falling far behind the Internet extension
to urban schools. Broadband was needed for the transmission of graphics and
multimedia sufficient enough to support online instruction in any subject. The
Fidonet, and Ufgate technologies, based on UUCP protocols of 'Store and
Forward' technologies were not enough, in the always-on and long time
connected era of TCP/IP and the Internet. The cost over rural telephone lines
would be prohibitive. So I was a very early investigator and user of Wireless,
including the new unlicensed wireless that has evolved into Wi-Fi (802.11b)
connectivity in urban areas.

In
1995, I was approached by the Networking Division of the National Science
Foundation some of whose Project Officers were deeply interested in using
advanced Internet in ways beyond what the NSF Educational Division was, and I
was asked to accept a grant of $350,000 to experiment with Wireless for
Education. I agreed, but only for education in rural and remote areas. So,
from 1995 to 1998, as Principal Investigator, I extended wireless Internet
links to Schools in such places as the poor, Hispanic San Luis Valley of
Colorado (see
http://wireless.oldcolo.com/course/reports.htm).

And I
retained the services as a CO-PI of Dr. Johnston, MIT who then taught an
accredited course in Math and Science to teachers in both rural schools and
urban schools linked by wireless broadband - so I could evaluate the adequacy
of the tools needed to really support bandwidth-demanding online math and
science by extending, wirelessly, the closest fat pipe from a commercial ISP.
In the San Luis Valley, I was able to make a 30 mile, zero operating cost link from
the small San Luis
School, to Alamosa for the $1,000 cost of two digital radios. US
West wanted $2,000 a month for the same distance, by tariffed T-1. US
West was not pleased by my legal bypass of their rural wire-monopoly networks.

From
the work I did in Lewistown, Montana in
1997 supporting the teaching of Field Science by wirelessly connected data
loggers by 7th Grade Science Class students and teachers to field
data site miles out of town, the NSF showed a different interest. Finding the
wireless technology I developed of direct benefit to university level
environmental and biological field scientists, they asked me to accept a 3
year, $1.2 million grant to 'Model' Wireless for fields science projects in
Alaska, Puerto Rico, Wisconsin and Virginia. This took most of my efforts from
1998 to 2002, so I did not pursue online formal teaching in the US after that.
However, I successfully asked research scientists to incorporate bright
science-oriented students from linkable local schools as 'remote lab
assistant' in their field work. That begins to open up connectivity between
universities and K-12 school kids and their teachers, letting exceptional
students advance more rapidly than the resources of the school can
support.

Currently I have been taking all I have learned, and applied it to formal
school level Distance Education in more remote areas – rural Wales, and very
remote Nepal. I trekked up in October 2003, on the route to Mt Everest to
12,000 foot Namche, Nepal donating and installing for the very isolated Sherpa
people in Namche, and the very poor school in Thame, wireless Internet
connectivity through a satellite IP link. It includes Voice over the Internet
SIP technology. In February, 2004, Sherpa Mingma of Pittsburgh, PA will be
teaching, by natural voice over the Internet into a speaker VOIP phone in the
Sherpa classroom, oral